Le Dépiquage des Moissons, also known as Harvest Threshing, and The Harvesters, is an immense oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). It was first revealed to the general public at the Salon de la Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912 (no. 43). This work, along with La Ville de Paris (City of Paris) by Robert Delaunay, is the largest and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-War Cubist period. Formerly in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, this monumental painting by Gleizes is exhibited at the National Museum of Western Art, in Tokyo, Japan.
Description The work is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 269 x 353 cm (106 x 138 in), signed and dated lower right, Gleizes, 1912. "Harvest Threshing", wrote curator and art historian Daniel Robbins for the Gleizes Guggenheim Retrospective in 1964, "summarizes Gleizes' interest in presenting an epic panorama of mountains, valleys, clouds and smoke, towns, workers and wheat, a simultaneous celebration of the harvest, nature and man in idealistic harmony." Gleizes' painting, as Henri Le Fauconnier's Abundance, likely takes its theme from the social and synthetic program of the Abbaye de Créteil, and too, from the poem of Henri-Martin Barzun, La Montagne, Poèmes légendaires, part 5 of La Terrestre Tragedie (Paris, Mercure de France, 1908): Les Moissonneurs dans les Epis, armes de faux et de faucilles... (pp. 49–56).
While the still-life and nude are common themes of pre-World War I Cubism, the work of Gleizes is characterized by ambitious subjects: the harvest, the hunt, the city, and, later, Broadway in New York City, and the Brooklyn Bridge (1915, Guggenheim, New York), one of his most abstract paintings of this period. Gleizes took this, according to Peter Brooke, as symbolic of the need to express the whole vast drama, the collection of unprecedented sensations of modern life. Harvest Threshing represents a big subject, rich in plastic possibilities. The interest of the painting resides in its rich and complex fabric of interwoven latticework, with 'the institution of relations between straight lines and curves' or the 'thousand surprises of fire and of shadow' proposed in Du "Cubisme" (co-authored with Jean Metzinger in 1912). The subject matter is entirely, as Le Fauconnier and Gleizes himself says, 'a pretext'. As Peter Brooke points out, a pencil transcription done to scale by Geneviève Dalban reveals the greatness of the construction. "The 'duration' that has been so much talked about is entirely a matter of the length of time that can be spent looking at it, as one thing leads to another, in and out and round about, in an endless visual dance. It is a mark of the failure of the Cubist revolution – its hi-jacking by the champions of the subject – that nearly one hundred years later there are writers on art who can see in such a picture only peasants, a church tower, a rustic meal, mountains, clouds..."
Background
In this painting can be observed the summing up of all present in the art of Georges Seurat: "the line, independent of its topographical role, possesses an assessable abstract value", it represented the furthest extension of Paul Cézanne's preoccupations: his will to deconstruct, his revolt against imitation and refusal of Renaissance perspective. Much as that of Les Baigneuses and Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud) painted the same year, the subject matter of Harvest Threshing—a semi-urban landscape that possesses both rural and semi-industrial components, juxtaposing sharply contrasting elements of both traditional and modern life—is derived from an unsentimental observation of the world. On the one hand the artist makes allusion to the traditional process of threshing—a step in grain preparation after harvesting and before winnowing, now mostly done by machine—and on the other, the artist includes elements from a society in the process of inexorable industrialization. Yet the compositional relationships between the two are formally resolved. The representation of this transition between classical tradition and contemporary life was noticeably of interest to Gleizes, as it was to other artists of the Section d'Or. "The organic process of life and civilization, moving irresistibly toward harmonious interaction," wrote Robbins, "was the subject of Gleizes' art." It was treated neither as a "confined symbolic allegory nor as a cultural background indicated by specific real appearance, but was instead presented in concrete and precise terms. Gleizes' Harvest Threshing, the masterpiece of the Section d'Or (no. 34), is not merely an anecdote in a scene. Rather, it is a multiple panorama celebrating the worker, his material life and his collective activity in securing that life on a permanently changing land. Gleizes confronts us not with one action or place, but with many: not with one time, but with past and future as well as present."(Robbins, 1964)
In contrast to Picasso and Braque
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